C-Norm: a neural approach to few-shot entity normalization

Area of Science:

• Biomedical informatics
• Computational linguistics
• Machine learning

Background:

• Entity normalization is a critical information extraction task, especially in biomedical and life sciences.
• Machine learning approaches struggle with the high multi-class and few-shot nature of entity normalization in specialized domains.
• Existing methods often require manually-designed, domain-specific rules.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce C-Norm, a novel neural approach for entity normalization.
• To address the challenges of multi-class and few-shot learning in specialized domains.
• To improve the performance of entity normalization without relying on domain-specific rules.

Main Methods:

• C-Norm synergistically combines standard and weak supervision.
• Integrates ontological knowledge and distributional semantics.
• Employs a neural network architecture.

Main Results:

• C-Norm significantly outperforms all evaluated methods on the Bacteria Biotope datasets (BioNLP Open Shared Tasks 2019).
• Achieved superior performance without incorporating any manually-designed domain-specific rules.
• Demonstrated effectiveness in highly multi-class and few-shot learning environments.

Conclusions:

• Shallow neural network methods can effectively handle complex entity normalization tasks.
• C-Norm provides a robust solution for specialized domains with limited labeled data.
• The proposed approach offers a promising direction for advancing information extraction in challenging fields.